Idea of Africa

From the discussion above it is evident that Africa and African identities can be conceived both as states of being and of becoming. In other words, "Africa" is a dynamic historical process, a messy spatio-temporal configuration of agency, structure, and contextuality that is subject to change, which is not always easy to perceive or predict. Africa, in this sense, has emerged out of the complex histories of the continent's peoples. Indeed, African historians have been in the forefront of constructing Africa as a coherent and complex object of study, investing the continent with a distinctive civilizational identity. They were among the first to take up the Eurocentric lie that Africa was a continent and Africans were a people "without history," an indictment intended to devalue their humanity.

The pivotal and central role of historians is precisely to propose a space, an axis to locate and make sense of the human experience, politically, socially, culturally, and economically. Needless to say, there are different types of African historians in terms of their training and institutional locations and methodological and theoretical orientations. Academic historians compete with "traditional" and popular historians in public historical discourse, so that there are continuous contestations about space, communities, and histories. But academic historians have tended to dominate in the production of the history of the postcolonial nation and the continental imaginary called Africa.

Once the dominant tendency was to produce linear and celebratory narratives of the nation and the continent, in which colonialism was reduced to a parenthesis or an episode, then the various subalterns wearing the identities of class, gender, or generation joined the historians' parade, before the postal turn (poststructural, postmodern, and postcolonial theories) that sought to reveal the fictionality of the whole enterprise, that the past is largely imagined, constructed, or invented. The better historians had always seen and constructed history as a series of messy, multiple, complex, and often conflicting processes and discourses about the past, produced simultaneously at local, national, and transnational levels, themselves connected and constructed in intricate and contradictory and ever changing ways.

By the end of the twentieth century, academic historians had produced a phenomenal amount of scholarship, invented and refined methodologies of research, and excavated the histories of African polities, societies, economies, cultures, and environments from the onerous weight of Eurocentric derision and Afrocentric romanticism. The publication of the UNESCO (1981–1993) and Cambridge (1977–1985) histories of Africa marked the apotheosis of this spectacular scholarly achievement. To be sure, there is much one can criticize about African historiography methodologically and theoretically, but the fact remains historians have written extensively on the development and invention of African cultural traditions and identities over time that make it possible to research, write, and teach about "African" history as a distinctive field, even if complexly connected to other histories, especially of "Europe."

Despite their prodigious production since independence, African historians, not to mention scholars from other disciplines, have not generally been anxious to propose the defining characteristics of Africa, the essential elements that constitute its development as an idea and a historical geography. The most renowned model is the one proposed by Ali Mazrui, the notion of the "triple heritage," that the African world is constituted by the confluence of three civilizations: the indigenous (traditional), Western (Christianity), and Arabic (Islam).

The three forces apparently exhibit enormous variations in their spatial and temporal manifestations, some are more dominant in certain regions, countries, and societies, and one could add here among certain classes and genders and at certain times, than in others. But the journey in Mazrui's gnosis seems not to be toward the harmonious and universal synthesis of the Negritude writers and philosophers, who posited a duality between Africa and Europe, reason and emotion, materialism and morality, humanity and nature, out of whose dialectical encounters and reconciliation a universal civilization would be forged. Rather it is toward a triumphant resurgence and reclamation of Africa's cultural spaces by tradition and Islam.

Mazrui did not invent the trilateralist view of Africa and its cultures and identities, that contemporary Africa contained an allegedly uneasy mixture of traditional, Western, and Islamic values and practices. The idea can be traced back to the 1887 work of Edward Blyden (1832–1912), the great nineteenth-century Liberian intellectual, for whom the modern "African personality," as he called it, was formed and would flourish out of the organic integration of the best elements from indigenous culture, Islam, and European science and Christianity. Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), the Pan-African activist and intellectual and Ghana's first president, elaborated on Blyden's notion of the "African personality" in his concept of consciencism, a cultural and cognitive synthesis between the humanistic and socialist ethos of "traditional" Africa, the acquisitive capitalist values and redemptive Christian hopes of the "West," and the holistic secular and spiritual precepts of Islam. Forged out of this crucible, the "African personality" would emerge, modern, assured, and liberated, ready to take its rightful place in the world.

Nkrumah has been faulted for not giving the traditional and Islamic legacies the kind of serious analysis accorded the Western one in his book Consciencism (1964). Part of some critics' unease with Nkrumah's schema is based on doubts that there indeed exists an exclusive and distinctive African traditional culture or a homogeneous African cultural universe. The same critique has been leveled against Mazrui, who has been attacked for what some regard as his evident partiality to Islam as the more benevolent force than the European-Christian and indigenous parts of the triad. In his withering critique of Mazrui's television series, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, Soyinka accused Mazrui of denigrating indigenous religions and cultures, a charge Mazrui vigorously denied (Mazrui and Mutunga).

The Mazrui-Soyinka debate over Mazrui's television series underscores the unresolved issues and stakes in contemporary definitions of Africa and Africanness. As noted with reference to Appiah above, both Soyinka and Mazrui do not historicize the moral, societal, and cultural values that constitute African identities. Their ethnographic notions of tradition are problematic; they ignore the sedimentations of exchanges, adaptations, inventions, and changes that the traditions in question, whether seen positively or negatively, have undergone. Often forgotten in these debates are several basic questions, such as how foreign, indeed, are Christianity and Islam to Africa, if we can restrict ourselves to the religious dimensions of the triple heritage for a moment. As histories of both religions clearly indicate, Christianity and Islam were implanted in certain parts of Africa almost at their inception and Africans made significant doctrinal contributions to both religions long before they were introduced to many parts of Europe and Asia where they are considered "indigenous," "traditional," or at least their "foreign" pedigree is not always emphasized.

This is to suggest that while the notion of the "triple heritage" highlights the diverse sources of African identities and cultures and seeks to clarify the complex streams that have flowed into their making, it flirts with an essentialized and almost ahistorical notion of a primordial Africa, a "real Africa," that somehow exists alongside external cultural diffusions, a narrative that is quite reminiscent of the misguided searches for a Hegelian "Africa proper." The inadequacies of the Blyden-Nkrumah-Mazrui cultural typologies do not mean that all attempts at creating such schemas are mistaken or doomed. Typologies or conceptual categories are essential to intellectual analysis; they are intended to clarify complex social phenomena. Difficulties often arise when the categories cease to be explanatory devices sensitive to human agency, social structure, and spatiotemporal contexts and begin to wallow in their own transcendental magnificence.